I think it can be summed up saying that clichés aren't all bad and if you recognize that they are simplistic looks at human nature they can be used effectively. It's amazing how motivated some people get from a seemingly simple catch phrase so why not use them if they work.

@laurieanne- Sure, cliche isn't going to save a bad leader. But I've followed good leaders my entire career and they all make much more use of cliche in their communications than they or anyone else would liek to admit.

At the heart of it, there's a reason a cliche is a cliche-- people repeat it so many times because of the inherent wisdom in it that we get tired of hearing it. It certainly seems like a bad idea to ask leaders to find new good ways to say the same thing or worse yet, ask them to say something wrogn just to avoid the cloche.

@terryb- But "When the going gets tough, the tough get going" isn't the kind of cliche I'm praising. that's the example of a bad leadership cliche.

The type of cliche that MIGHT help in that situation is something like "we pride ourselves on the hard work of our employees" or "we are innovators." These are instructive to the mission and might help create the identity of your workers or influence your culture.

If you make your cliches central to your mission, people have something to fall back on.

To learn more about what organizations are doing to tackle attacks and threats we surveyed a group of 300 IT and infosec professionals to find out what their biggest IT security challenges are and what they're doing to defend against today's threats. Download the report to see what they're saying.

Is DevOps helping organizations reduce costs and time-to-market for software releases? What's getting in the way of DevOps adoption? Find out in this InformationWeek and Interop ITX infographic on the state of DevOps in 2017.

Chances are your organization is adopting cloud computing in one way or another -- or in multiple ways. Understanding the skills you need and how cloud affects IT operations and networking will help you adapt.